What a Phony Market

OK, so let's see. Europe was up about half of what we were, which isn't bad given that we were up a little more than the day before, which puts us so we should probably be down about 1% ... but there are animal spirits that looked great yesterday, so we won't be down that much, so bid a half percent down from the close and then walk it up as we get closer (unless there is news).

There, that's the nonsense game I used to play in my head about what the buyers and sellers of futures were going to do.

It's pretty right.

It's pretty stupid.

It's pretty right and stupid because it is what we trade off of, but what we should be trading off of is whether we are going to save the automakers or whether there will be another run against Goldman Sachs (GS - commentary - Cramer's Take) or whether Citigroup's (C - commentary - Cramer's Take) insider buying is a joke or not. We should be betting on preannouncements and weakness and no ECB cuts, not on some ratio of Europe to us.

But it is all betting all the time, and the only thing that intrudes is the gaming of the crushed hedge funds.

If you don't believe that, then you didn't watch Intel (INTC - commentary - Cramer's Take) yesterday. Here is a company that is getting hit harder than it ever has since 1988 ... and people bought it on the news.

Of course, they didn't really buy it. They bought the ETF that it is a part of. That was enough.

So it went higher.

That's the kind of market we are in, a gigantic phony market where nothing can be trusted to be interpreted right, because nothing matters other than the direction that the last big futures or ETF buyer wants it to go.

Hmm, is that the way bear markets end?

I guess so, because everyone I hear on TV says it bottomed yesterday.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long Goldman Sachs.

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Know what you own: Cramer mentions Intel. Other companies in the semiconductor industry include AMD (AMD - commentary - Cramer's Take), Texas Instruments (TXN - commentary - Cramer's Take), Sun Micro (JAVA - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Micron (MU - commentary - Cramer's Take).

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